This invention relates to a coin mechanism used for vending machines or exchangers and, more particularly, to a device and method for managing amount of coins stored in a coin storing device provided in such coin mechanism.
Further, this invention relates to a sales management device performing sales management on the basis of the amount of coins stored in the coin storing device and also the amount of coins in a coin box receiving coins which have overflown from the coin storing device.
In a coin mechanism in a vending machine, there is generally provided a coin storing device called a coin tube. A deposited coin is supplemented to coins stored in this coin tube and a coin or coins among the coins stored in the coin tube are paid out as change or money to be returned. When the amount of stored coins has reached a full state, a coin which overflows from the coin tube is guided to a coin box. In managing the amount of stored coins in such coin tube, it has been a general practice that an operator such as a route man takes out all coins in the coin tube by depressing an inventory switch to collect these coins as the amount of sales and then he supplements a suitable amount of coins to the coin tube by manual operation. Since, in this case, the amount of coins manually supplemented constitutes the base of calculation of next amount of sales, it is very important to check how many coins have been manually supplemented. For this reason, it has been a general practice to have the number of coins counted by the operator while he is manually supplementing coins or to supplement coins manually until the coin tube becomes full and regard this full state to be the amount of coins manually supplemented.
The former method, i.e., supplementing coins while counting the number of coins one by one, is very troublesome and tends to cause mistakes. The latter method is also inconvenient in managing because there are difference in the size between coin tubes and also difference in thickness between coins so that the number of coins at a full amount of one coin tube is not necessarily the same as that of another coin tube.
Further, since it is not possible in the prior art devices to detect, by denomination, coins which have overflown from a coin tube and have been guided to a coin box, it is not possible to conduct management such as summing of the current amount of coins and displaying thereof in the coin tube and summing of the current amount of coins and displaying thereof in the coin box.